Month: August 2015

Jason injured his hand about 3 weeks ago and he had surgery 2 weeks ago. He cut himself butchering a pig and sliced through the nerve, artery, and nicked the tendon sheath of his right hand’s pointer finger.

It’s been a slow road to recovery… He hasn’t been able to move around much because of the pain/discomfort and it’s always hard to do very much for yourself with only one hand in operation.

So… We’ve been looking for ways for him to heal faster. Your diet, of course, is really the most important component of healing!

And what better meal to eat than a meal made of the very organic materials that are healing? Tendons, muscles, and nerves!

24 duck feet waiting in the pot!

So we made the most delicious duck foot soup! We had 24 feet from our duck butchery a few months ago. We made it Vietnamese style, with spicy peppers, soy sauce, carrots, garlic, onions, celery, and tons of shiitake mushrooms! Shiitake mushrooms have numerous health benefits: they fight “bad” bacteria, viruses, and contain tons of B vitamins and many other micronutrients that are essential to life and healing. To this soup we added rice noodles and fresh cilantro and basil.

It was perhaps the most delicious meal we’ve had in months… And it’s gone now. We ate it for lunch and dinner every day until there was no more!

The feet of birds are often very fatty (unprocessed animal fat from healthy, organic animals is good for you!!!) and filled with awesome gelatin and nutrients! We moaned in enjoyment while we ate!

Sometimes we let the little buggers (literally, bug hunters!) out for a chance to roam free. We still have to keep an eye on them because they are small enough to be hurt by a larger chicken or taken by a hawk (especially the ducklings). Today they got a solid 2 hours of freedom out in the yard, where they enjoyed chasing bugs, sun bathing, chowing down on seed heads, and drinking from random puddles of water!

Nothing makes our day more than having kids come visit us at the homestead. Beginning some time next month, we will be hosting a homestead tour so all interested kids and adults can come see the animals for themselves. But in the meantime, let these videos of our friend Meredith and her lovely kids, Emi and Teddy, make you smile.

Our electric poultry fencing has been an eye-opening experiment so far…

What we’ve learned:

1. Setting up the fencing takes a few hours each time but depending on how large of a space we make, the birds can occupy the space for weeks at a time.

2. The ducks respect the fence, and since getting shocked a few times, have stayed as far away from the fence as possible. Every few days a duck will get spooked, and since we have not clipped their wings, it might fly over by accident. It sometimes takes the poor duck a few hours to get up the nerve to jump back through the fence. They definitely respect the boundaries!

3. The geese are the most respectful of all, never going over and never coming close to the fence.

4. The turkeys are a different story, however! They respect the fence on a hit-and-miss basis, sometimes staying inside the fence and other times taking the shock and climbing through. The most annoying part is that when they have no trouble escaping, they have loads of trouble figuring out how to get back in. We are looking into getting electrified netting to use for the turkeys in the future, but we’ll see!

The big electric-fencing-for-poultry lesson is:

Simple electrified strands work for ducks and geese, but not for turkeys!